[ANSWERED] Dante and Isadora?

[lwebster]

Hi everyone,

Has anyone used Isadora in conjunction with Dante, specifically one with QLab? I'm in a new theatre where all AV is run through Dante, and I'm being told that there are no alternatives, but there have been issues in the past of integrating Dante with other software. I'm personally not familiar with Dante at all. Do you have any experience or tutorials related to that?

Thanks in advance!

[Juriaan]

@lwebster

It depends largely on the amount of unique audio channels that you have / use. Normally we can use something called Dante Via or Dante Virtual Soundcard which basically creates a bridge between Isadora's (and any program that can output sound) Sound engine and in this case the Dante Network.

You also have hardware solutions which basically converts a signal to a Dante Network child. 

See https://www.audinate.com/produ... for some of their products that they offer under the 'AVIO' flag.

Just ask the theatre or they already offer Dante AVIO adapters, if not simply ask them how they normally do it and or there is a requirement on their side for it to work.

[Fred]

@lwebster the Dante virtual sound card is cheap and very reliable. You will need a network adapter, but it’s a great system and very flexible. 

If you have the network adapter and the software license then it sounds like the theatre staff will take care of the rest. 

The Dante virtual sound card is a virtual sound card (better software than the often unstable drivers of mid tier audio gear). It runs transparently and as it is a sound card it doesn’t matter what software you use. 

Things get trickier when you want to run 32+ channels of IO from your machine. 

[kirschkematthias]

Hi

I alway using Dante in the theater. You need the Dante Virtual Soundcard (DVS), it works like any other external soundcard, and the Dante Controller, which is a free App, to route your outputs/inputs to the mixer or back. It's very simple, very flexible and if you start using Dante you don't want to miss it anymore.

Because it runs over CAT 5e you can sit in the middle of the auditorium to do your mixing, just with a cheap long cable, and after rehearsal you go back to the FOH take a short cable, and everything works fine.

many greetings

Matthias

 

[Armando]

@kirschkematthias Isadora could become Dante compatible, but Audinate people ask for money just to make it happen. This might influence its final price. Since Audinatre is owning their proprietary system, they monetize everything. I am sure it would be possible. And as codirector of a non profit workink to help innovation in tech for the arts we could help making it happen). But since Audinate asks for money tp make sftware compatible we could make a small informal poll. Who would pay a little fee to have a Dante AV plugin in Isadora ? (I wouldn't ask Troikatronix to pay alone for the fee because it is very niche)

[Paz]

@Armando and Izzy community I would definitely appreciate this addition. Dante is integral to the theatre / university where I work. I would be happy to pay for a plugin within Isadora  

[Woland]

@armando said:

Isadora could become Dante compatible, but Audinate people ask for money just to make it happen.

Yes, sadly we investigated this a couple of years ago but had to abandon the idea because Audinate wanted a 5-figure fee (annually) to allow us to include it and we just couldn't justify such a large, ongoing cost for something that we couldn't guarantee would even make us back what it was costing us per year. We opted not to take the chance and experiment for a year because we didn't want people to build patches around Isadora's native Dante support, then have those patches break at the start of the next year if we decided we couldn't keep paying Audinate's fee. Being forced to pull the rug out from under Isadora users who had come to rely on a new feature after a year or two years wasn't something we wanted to do to our community.

[Woland]

@paz said:

I would be happy to pay for a plugin within Isadora

Unfortunately, it's not a simple task for us to make a paid plugin for Isadora. Currently, we have no system for payment and licensing centered on disabling or enabling a certain plugin. The IzzyCast plugins don't really work that way; the plugins themselves aren't disabled if you don't have an IzzyCast Account Key, the server just won't listen to you when you tell it to make an IzzyCast Session. With Dante we'd need to enable or disable functionality on your computer (not allow or deny you permission to do something on the cloud) based on a licensing check involving a specific plugin (which would have to work separately from your Isadora license because you'd want to be able to use Dante in demo mode to run shows), so we couldn't really re-use our existing licensing infrastructure. Thus we'd have to develop a new, unique licensing and payment system (which takes quite a bit of programming, consulting, text-writing and refining, product configuration, store and licensing testing, etc). Frustratingly, even if we did all of that, we'd still be gambling on whether or not we'd make back the 5-figure annual fee from Audinate (in addition to what it would cost us in terms of personnel hours to develop, test, launch, and support the new feature). Frankly, at the time (a few years ago) we also really didn't like the idea that incorporating Dante would force us to start charging for specific features because it very much goes against our values as a company and it just wasn't a line we wanted to cross. We want everything in Isadora to be as accessible as possible to everyone (which is why you can use all of Isadora's features except saving without a license). Sadly with IzzyCast we just didn't have any other choice than to go that route; believe me, if we didn't need to be charging for usage of IzzyCast the way we are, it would also be entirely free like every single other Add-On we've released (FFGL, GLSL Shaders, NDI, Screen Capture, OpenNI, Rokoko, Line Grapher, Rutt-Etra, ArtNet, JSON, example files, soon Pythoner, etc). We are not charging for IzzyCast because we want to, it would honestly be much simpler for us if we could have made it free like everything else. That being said, while we couldn't make IzzyCast completely free, we did structure the model so that it is free for all the participants (they don't even need an Isadora license); it's only the host that needs to pay anything extra for IzzyCast to work (and even the host could run IzzyCast in demo mode without an Isadora license if they wanted to).

TLDR: We would love to put Dante into Isadora, we investigated it and had discussions with Audinate, but at the moment it's just not feasible for us.

[Fred]

@woland what would be the advantage of having anything built in? The virtual sound card is chape and works perfectly. What would the integration mean that we cannot get using DVS?

[Woland]

@fred

I don’t know, I’m really not familiar with how Dante works because I don’t work with audio often. All I know is that people were asking for the feature so we put some effort into communicating with Audinate to see what it would take to make it happen.

I’m honestly really glad to hear, especially from such an experienced member of the community, that there’s a perfectly good workflow without native support for Dante in Isadora though :)

[Fred]

@woland I took a look at the Dante enabled products on the Audinate website and there is very little software and it’s vert specific. 

I would guess the requests to have Dante enabled software are misguided, from folks that might not understand the system. Even the biggest media servers just use the DVS. 

Full integration is for very specific use cases, and mostly hardware. The whole idea is that it’s a sound card and that’s how it’s meant to work. 

@paz and @armando

What do you imagine that Dante compatible would do other than mean you don’t buy the DVS?

Do you know any other software that is Dante enabled? If so what does it do?

[Paz]

@fred you are absolutely correct with your view point. Dante DVS works!

It was more a case that I would prefer to invest my money in TroikaTronix than Audinate. 

Currently I use DVS which costs approx £70 per licence (each computer requires it's own licence - this gets costly in education establishment). Having a TroikaTronix Dante actor similar to the NDI 5 actor that can offer both audio and video channels - Dante AV - would open up potential opportunities for integration into a system without the need for the additional Audinate software.

@woland your points about Dante's cost implementation into Isadora are completely understood and I appreciate Audinate DVS is the way forward. 

Best wishes, Simon

[Fred]

@paz wow brexit really took its toll, it is €54 from the EU that would be- £46 (for the simple licence). I am guessing the extra is a brexit tax.

I do understand the cost, and likely in an institution, just the pain of having to manage another licence. Looking at the landscape of Dante products, it seems only hardware tools have the Dante enabled built in structure - these hardware tools often run some kind of OS underneath so it is a bit confusing. I am really surprised Audinate have not released an Enterprise model for bulk licencing. For the cost however, havign Dante enabled mixing desks and some other IO gear mostly works out cheaper than getting soundcards.

I can also imagine this would be an annoying scenario to build with - you would want to test and setup your project with a normal sound setup, like headphones and then when you go to plug into a system you have to rebuild (or double build on the fly). As isadoras audio routing is only for audio files, there isnt much to plug in to an audio out node as yet either.

On another note Dante AV is a thing, but its pretty clunky. The video part of Dante only works on windows, and Dante studio, that deals with the video, needs to run separetly to the DVS audio stuff. I am guessing they will get things going cross platform and smoothly integrated some time in the future, but for now NDI is way beter for video.

[Paz]

@fred Thank you for the in depth response your wise words are very helpful. 

Regarding the cost, I had originally purchased DVS at the lower price you quoted, but then had to buy an additional transferable licence which costs approx £70 to enable me to swap my DVS licence between computers.

Thanks again and best wishes!

[Armando]

@woland I get it I'll link a post to MPEG H audio over ethernet.... Soon more on that

[Armando]

@fred You are right Fred, I don't know well the system, but I have been to a AV expo where I talked to Audinate people quite a bit. And they pushed for it telling that when embedded in a software it could now bring together AES50 (Music Tribe, therefore Midas, Behringer etc...) Plus AES 67 (opensource dante-like protocol. But You are right, as I said, I don't know it well. The idea that in Isadora we might have a unified system for the 3 protocols is interesting.  

[lwebster]

@kirschkematthias Thank you so much! So, we just need the DVS and the free app, not a network adapter?

[lwebster]

@fred Thank you! Another person said they just needed the DVS and a free controller app - but in your experience, we also need to purchase a network adapter?

[Fred]

@lwebster you can’t use wifi so if your computer doesn’t have a network port you need the Ethernet adapter. 

[lwebster]

@fred Oh I see, so it can be any adapter to hardwire into ethernet, it doesn't have to be one of Dante's AVIO networking adaptors?